A few days ago I took a deep dive into JackBe (www.jackbe.com) Enterprise Mashups. Over the years there have been really just a handful of products like this that have attempted to be the portal/aggregator for multiple sources of data, from multiple systems. The idea of "wiring" together information blurbs from various enterprise systems into a dashboard summary view of a business's operations is very compelling, but to date this hasn't been a reality without making it a significant custom software development activity.
It's hard to do, and JackBe's Presto product makes a valiant effort. The dream is getting closer thanks to open web standards like WebServices, but discovering services in the cloud or your enterprise, and making sense of the output of those services, is still sort of like being a translator in roomful of delegates from the four corners of the globe. The "open standards" everyone is speaking really just means we have all agreed to use spoken-word to communicate, rather than writing thoughts on sticky-notes or hand signals. The languages we utter are still all over the place.
The problem is that we're defining the request/response patterns, but the content of that communication is pretty opaque to someone who hasn't been steeped in the system. Making a mashup is still a bit of work because the mashup developer has to reformat, aggregate and generally massage all of these data streams into some common structure so that the mashup can render something coherently. When the mashup developer only has the published, off-the-shelf services at his/her disposal, there's lots of this gluing to be done.
I think that movements such as the semantic web will begin to leak out into the popular culture of software development, and that will be a good start to formalizing Web-based data and improving reuse and mashability. Until then, I had a great time mashing up Axeda platform data since I could essentially implement my own Web Service, in the cloud, using Scripto.
What are your thoughts on this? What do you think of the semantic web, or even Web Services in general? Where does all of this need to go in order for us to be able to hand services to business analysts for slicing, dicing, and mashing?
